Topics - Delta

2018 was great!

Although the UGX-Mods team (the few remaining ppl) stepped back from zombie modding,we still love to see so much user generated content and activity in the modding scene.Outstanding tools, amaizing maps,helpful tutorials and Q&A across the web - you guys rock!

The new UGX-Mods site overhaul is finally released and we hope we can grow bigger in 2019 with more cool features and improvements.

UGX Launcher

Our anticipated goal to release the UGX Launcher in 2018 was not possible due to personal events and of course the work on our site overhaul, but we are very optimistic that 2019 will be a great year with the release of the UGX Launcher which will finally replace the UGX MapManager and allows us to support and maintain the application as long as people are actively using it.

Activity

Over the past two years we noticed less activity and this year we try to find solutions to bring back the good old times. If you have a great idea or want to help us -> let us know!On the other side: we are close to 500k registered members (crazy!) and we will hit it this year for sure.

Thank You

A big thank you goes to our site and chat moderators - we wouldn't be here without them!Of course also a big shoutout to our V.I.P's (former UGX-Mods members / partners / etc.), our lovely Donators and of course every single user who are with us and keep this community alive. Thank you

Current State:Most of the issues have been resolved by now. We will monitor the situation and will do further improvements and optimizations if needed. The Forum / Site has some critical issues atm.The most dramatic one is the 502 error thrown by Cloudflare due to most likely our server.I assume it's performance related and my hopes are to find a solution during the weekend.

If you encounter issues a simple reload should most likely fix it. - I know: not perfect - but thats what you get when a single developer is responsible for everything and only a small testing group checked the beta site out.

Hey guys,

after over two years it's finally here, our site overhaul.It was a long and stressfull journy and we are happy to finally share this project with everyone.

Please forgive us if there are some issues in the next few days, we will monitor the site and might hotfix issues which we simply couldn't find in our Closed, Donor & Open Beta

Hello community,

Today is an exciting day for us. We have finally released our new UGX-Mods Forum as Open Beta to everyone.

Simply head over to https://beta.ugx-mods.com to get started - be sure to give us feedback (see below) so that we can improve it before it goes live on our main domain (production).

Please note: Your user settings won't be carried over, so beta and non beta (production) won't share the same settings.This also effects some forum settings and statistics like total forum user count and such.

Other than that, Beta and Production share the same data and you are free to use Beta as long the Open Beta goes.

You can also share beta links, once we move out we simply redirect the links to the correct site

Before we dive into the major changes, let's talk about you and your privacy first!

GDPR | Your privacy

You probably received dozens of emails about Privacy Policy changes and such. Well we updated our as well!We refined it and made it more transparent. We also respect the EU GDPR and apply the changes and features to everyone including non EU citizens.We face one big issue: Currently only https://beta.ugx-mods.com has these changes!We try to get out of the Open Beta as fast as possible but we believe it will take up to two weeks before we can do that.If you have any GDPR related concerns, simply use https://beta.ugx-mods.com which has all changes to comply with GDPR already.We most likey will refine our Privacy Policy further and require your consent soon again - we are no experts

Major changes in Open Beta

The work began 2 long years ago and we added and improved a lot since then. Here some major highlights but there is a lot more:

New HTML5 theme which is responsive and mobile ready (now you can browse on your phone without issues!)

New HTML Text Edtior (CKEditor) for creating and editing your topics and replies.

New gallery and slider options for images

Easy media emebed with iframely, simply paste a link into the editor and magic happens

Autocomplete for emotes and widgets (try to type in : ) or #UGX and see what happens)

We evaluate your feedback and put it into our development roadmap. Hopefully you are excited with the new forum and everything works out smoothly.That would mean that production would be soon ready for the new forum theme.

It has been a long journey for me (Delta) and I'm personally very excited to share with everyone my work

NOTE: the new html emails might also be sent out (rarely) to non-beta users!NOTE2: we changed the sender email from [email protected] to [email protected] for the new emails.We will deprecate noreply soon or later, so be sure to update your email rules & filters and include[email protected] to your contacts list, to ensure you get them without any issues!

HTML Emails?!

After weeks of work, a new update on https://beta.ugx-mods.com/forum is out for all donators.We are getting closer to the Open Beta!The biggest update are our emails which we sent out daily to you.We now have shiny new HTML based emails. Not all emails will be sent out yet due to production vs beta state - but you'll progressivly notice the new emails and once we go Open Beta and beyoned, you'll get used to them

This is a major change - feedback as usual much apprecaited. If you notice something is totally odd, let us know!

The migration to our new server went almost without any issues (so far ).

We had an issue with mail sending for around 18 hours, all registration emails should have been resent.If not, simply contact us or request the registration email here: https://www.ugx-mods.com/forum/activate/

New Server - Okay?! - So what exactly does that mean now?

We have now twice as much bandwidth which means a total of 500 Mbps.Our server is also faster (better CPU) but thats not relevant to you.

Before our new server, our development tools (Jira, Confluence, ...) and our production websites (UGX-Mods Forum, ...) where hosted on the same server.Now the forum and upcoming services will run on their own server, this ensures less performance impact when we do some busy dev stuff

We can ensure more redundant backups. We have in total three server now, so each (critical) backup is synced to two servers now.

The new server offered us a new fresh start.

I'm a hobbyist server administrator.That means I didn't received any porfessional schooling or anything like that.It's all based on carefull internet resarch, learning by doing and my technical interest in these things.

For UGX I do this now for over 5 years and a fresh start offered me to revisit best practice.That helped us to migrate easily to a new database engine, a newer PHP version and also improved web server configuration.

The result is a faster and more secure system than before.

Speaking of security

SSL/TLS

We recently moved our site to enforced full TLS encryption.With the server move, we also send now an so called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) Header.We configured it that way, that your browser will remember the website as HTTPS only and will only make HTTPS connections now.If our certificate is wrong or anything like that, the browser will block the access to the site / request.(it's a really easy explenation - but the message is here that we enhanced the security )

We are applying to the preload list now, so browser vendors (like Chrome and Firefox) will hardcode our domain in their list.

Meltdown & Spectre

You might have heard about Meltdown and Spectre recently, especially with Intel CPU.All our servers use Intel Xenons (Server CPUs) and yes - they are all effected by this.

The good news first: Our systems are patched against Meltdown (case 1).

But apparently we are not secured against Spectre (case 2 & case 3) yet.We are awaiting patches by the devs and as soon as they are out we will update our systems.

It might impact performance but based on our current state it won't be noticable (at least for you ).

Fruther improvements this year

We will monitor and further improve / tweak the server. This is an ongoing (time consuming) process.On my todo list is more monitorng, better security audits,

Whats next?

The server migration is over and I can slowly go back to web development.A new major patch is almost ready for the Closed Beta and we hope that the Open Beta can happen soon.Maybe February?

Thank you sooo much

I would like to thank foremost our donators and supporters, every individual who contributes to this website and / or community.Thanks to you, I can do this fun, great and amaizing hobby and while I had some sleepless and stressfull nights (especially the past few days) it's still filling me with joy and a good feeling that we serve for over 6 years now this amaizing forum for amaizing people (like you!).

Also please take part on our survey if you haven't yet.It's a great motivation boost (I read every single one of them) and insight into what you guys think and want from UGX-Mods.

Expected downtime of the forum: under 1 hourPlease note that it might come to further issues after the maintenance, so please forgive us if the first 24 hours might be a bit slower or if there are errors.

The forum will be put into maintenance mode. - You won't be able to read or write.

We will update the status on Discord, Twitter and at https://status.ugx-mods.com/ following by an new announcement (with more information) once we are confident that the new server is fully running.

The new year is here and it's going to be a good year for sure!Year 2018 will be the year which is going to revamp UGX-Mods.

We start with our new homepage, which is going into Open Beta at the end of Q1 2018.Everyone is then invited to check out what we have been working on for almost two years now. °O°

After that we want to release the major Update of the UGX Launcher to donors first, following with an Open Beta in Q3 2018.Besides those two major releases / updates from UGX-Mods, we hope to see a lot of user generated content for WaW, BO1 and BO3.

WebRTS is my bachelor project (the reason why I can't do anything for UGX atm) and you can play it in your browser (Google Chrome) for free right now.The great thing about this game is, that it uses Open Street Map, so you actually play on the real earth.

At the moment the focus is on a small area in Germany for testing, but in the future bigger areas (maybe the whole earth) will be available.

So if you are interested, simply visit the WebRTS website, signup and play a quick round.(The game requires atm at least two human players, so depending on the time of day it might take a bit)

PLEASE NOTE:This game / project is very early in development. You probably will notice performance issues / downtimes and so on.I would appreciate it if don't try to "break the system" - give me and others a chance to play and improve the game

If you can't reach the website, try it later again. I will try to update & optimize it whenever I have time.(my deadline is in two weeks and I still need to write my BA)

I think the game / website will be under heavy load soon x,x

If possible (and if you are interested into RTS games), be sure to get your friends as well.I don't think the server is capable of many players at the same time (thats why I do this alpha stress test) - but maybe it works out for your group at the right time and you can enjoy a 4 vs 4 match.